Dunkin'Copied

Customers had called it Dunkin' for years, a nickname the brand itself leaned on in its America Runs on Dunkin' tagline. In September 2018 the company announced it would make it official from January 2019, as part of a plan to become what it called the premier beverage-led, on-the-go brand. Coffee, not donuts, was where it saw growth.

Visually, almost nothing new was drawn. The pink and orange colours stay, and so does the rounded, chunky typeface introduced in 1973. What changes is subtraction: the word Donuts, the coffee cup icon and the tagline all go, leaving the single word DUNKIN' with its apostrophe. The company stressed it would still sell donuts; they just would not be in the name. CMO Tony Weisman said it had been tested extensively in core and newer markets, and that the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

The rebrand was the most visible part of a strategy under chief executive David Hoffmann to make Dunkin' beverage-led. Its first new-concept store opened in Pasadena, California. When one opened in Boston, Boston Magazine captured local grief over losing the Donuts. Reuters had already found doughnut lovers unhappy when the change was announced.

Jones Knowles Ritchie developed the branding, with BBDO New York and Arc Worldwide on communications.

Results came quickly. Restaurant Business reported that first-quarter 2019 US same-store sales rose 2.4 percent, Dunkin's best gain in four years, with espresso sales up 30 percent. Not all of that is the name, but the numbers matched the story the name was telling.

Tony Weisman gave Boston Magazine the fullest version of the reasoning. The identity had gone through six iterations in 70 years, and the coffee cup in the old mark dated from a push to be seen as beverage-led, a point he considered made. With three billion doughnuts and Munchkins sold a year, the company was not backing away from them, but it wanted a cleaner expression for a world read through small screens and app icons. What kept the brand recognisable, he argued, was what stayed: the pink and orange and the Dunkin' Frankfurter typeface, created in 1973. The name had been tested on stores in Pasadena and Boston first, and he compared the approach to Fenway Park, modernised without losing its essence.

This is a good example of a rebrand that is really a naming decision. Keeping the type and colours preserved decades of recognition, while dropping one word quietly changed the company's category. The design is barely different; the business is meaningfully different. That is about as efficient as a rebrand gets.